Silver is dead?

Bill, thanks for your answers! Maybe it's a language thing, yes... I say film is better, because it moves my spirit in ways digital shooting just doesn't. Most of the times I used pro digital equipment, it was not for pleasure, and not even my interest, but just because who was going to pay my work was in a hurry, and even for those jobs, film quality was above digital. So, better means more pleasure for some people. Better means I'll keep my job for some others, and I am not talking about anyone in particular. I also think some of the M10 dreams around mean, in part, digital shooters miss film pleasure and they want digital cameras with a feel somehow closer to that pleasure they once knew...

Cheers,

Juan
 
KM-25 said:
My experience was this....

In 1994, I was told by then editor Steve Whitmore, son of late actor James Whitmore that we had to go digital, it was the brave new world, the future. He even gave us t-shirts that said "Digital or Die". I hated the first 10 years of it, cropped sensors, 1.3 megapixel cameras that needed to be plugged in when the battery died because you could not take the battery out. I remember Mary Ellen Mark looking at me in Pity when my NC2000 camera battery died as Bob Dole emerged from a limo while he was on the campaign trail. They were $14,000 a piece, huge and lousy.

But it got better and my attitude got better, after all, I was a pioneer, I was winning awards, helping AP figure out how we could use flash without making the subject look nuked...diffuse, diffuse, diffuse...

But something was missing, the wonderful attributes of a specific film, the not seeing the image right away, the reality of an image born not of a computer screen, but a paintbrush called film.

So after some 16 years of using digital, I am pretty much done with it except for specific circumstances. Most of those circumstances will be motion picture making, not stills.

I have built a darkroom, I get large Ilfochromes made from black and white Techpan slides processed in dr5, I shoot 20x24 litho film in a giant pinhole, I shoot the real thing man, I shoot FILM!

Yes, digital was well worth it, I can do it in my sleep. But the best part is it taught me that film is photography and digital is really not. For everything we do now days gets rammed up the arse of a computer, the thing that is killing backs, wrists, minds, vision, jobs and turning eye contact into i-contact.

I have had enough of this sh_t, I have had enough of fake photography ooozing in photoshop born mediocrity, I have had enough of digital.

So no, silver is not dead because I am not dead. One of the magazines I do regular work for assigned me to do a piece that would fill three pages. I shot it with my Hasselblad, souped the film in my kitchen, made actual darkroom prints and showed them at the meeting. They gave it three more pages and doubled my rate.

And yes, you had better damn well believe Silver is Better!
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KM, thanks for sharing.. i-contact ?? HA HA HA Very good!!
 
KM-25 said:
... I shoot the real thing man, I shoot FILM!...
But the best part is it taught me that film is photography and digital is really not...I have had enough of this sh_t, I have had enough of fake photography ooozing in photoshop born mediocrity, I have had enough of digital...So no, silver is not dead because I am not dead...And yes, you had better damn well believe Silver is Better!
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Please define photography? Because, you have just insulted an entire group of people who choose to shoot via digital. A group of photographers that are producing some of the most compelling images in the news, magazines, and fine art.
 
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No insult at all from KM-25.

He's on his own right to consider photography as an art related to physical sensitive media AND related to all the previous artists who played that game.

Even if new games appear, and even if they can help for visual communication, there's the real game with silver.

For me, for example, the game ends after clicking the shutter. Developing must be precise, yes, but what moves me is what happens before...

Cheers,

Juan
 
biggambi said:
If this isn't the biggest bunch of hyperbole, self adulation, and egocentric statements. Define photography? Because, you have just insulted an entire group of people who choose to shoot via digital. That are producing some of the most compelling images in the news, magazines, and fine art.
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Oh, come on, it's just his PO.. ;)
 
You all realize of course, that this thread, and Bill's one about Thom Hogan and Michael Reichmann's opinions for the future of the M system aren't actually going to go anywhere.

Cheers,
-Gautham

p.s. - I'm going to be a cheeky imp and post some pictures, but not tell you which side I refer to. Tongue in cheek. I'll leave you to do the google image search for "missing the point" while fully admitting that my post is missing the point of this thread. Which is clearly that popcorn is tasty and some of us should sit back and have some.


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biggambi said:
If this isn't the biggest bunch of hyperbole, self adulation, and egocentric statements. Define photography? Because, you have just insulted an entire group of people who choose to shoot via digital. That are producing some of the most compelling images in the news, magazines, and fine art.
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Nah, he didn't. He just dissed reliance on photoshop instead of making a photo with a camera.
 
Kinda like dissing reliance on enlargers instead of making a photo with a camera.

But it's awfully hard to see those tiny little negative images without the enlarger.
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Gautham, there's no such thing here as a "side". We're all together on the same ship.
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You realize this will just change the debate to whether said ship is the Titanic or the Queen Mary and I'll just be the git that shows up in another 7 pages telling you that it is really the Goodyear blimp :)
 
Come on! Of course KM-25 knows a photograph is a good shot even being digital if the image deserves it and the photographer knows how to do things: he just meant the name photography means silver photography, not digital photography. It's just plain history: "painting" shouldn't be the name for computer generated images either. It's simple. But we're on the same boat of visual arts.

Cheers,

Juan
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
I didn't mean the ship is film: I really meant there's only one ship...
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Yes Juan, I got that.
(At least I think I did - we can get into quite the tizzy about what "got" means)

All of us. One ship.
Titanic or Queen Mary or Goodyear blimp. And everything in between.
You did not mean film.

It is quite easy to end up in knots with all these nautical references.
Will we all float on? No? Well, with some luck, these analogies will make some of the others go off the deep end.

Cheers,
-Gautham

p.s.: There may or may not be parallels to film and silver halide printing
 
From Websters Online Dictionary:

Main Entry: pho·tog·ra·phy
Pronunciation: \fə-ˈtä-grə-fē\
Function: noun
Date: 1839
: the art or process of producing images by the action of radiant energy and especially light on a sensitive surface (as film or a CCD chip)
 
Juan Valdenebro said:
Come on! Of course KM-25 knows a photograph is a good shot even being digital if the image deserves it and the photographer knows how to do things: he just meant the name photography means silver photography, not digital photography. It's just plain history: "painting" shouldn't be the name for computer generated images either. It's simple. But we're on the same boat of visual arts.

Cheers,

Juan
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Juan,

You are not actually going to try and argue that capturing an image on a digital sensor is not photography are you? I would love to hear your full argument on this topic. The first camera did not even preserve the image as it was projected onto a wall. The first camera to record the image did not use silver, and it goes on. Not to mention that lenses where not used until later. So, at what point do we decide this constitutes photography, and a camera?

Kindest Regards,
 
Got to think it's pretty extreme when film fans start marginalizing digital photographers by arguing that what they do isn't even photography. Relegating most photographers to a digital ghetto is pretty hard core. Smacks of religion.
 
Pickett Wilson said:
Got to think it's pretty extreme when film fans start marginalizing digital photographers by arguing that what they do isn't even photography. Relegating most photographers to a digital ghetto is pretty hard core. Smacks of religion.
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Extreme? Perhaps, but not at all marginalizing. Imaging connotes something beyond the 19th century technology that the word photography brings to mind. In a few years cameras won't even look the same, and the still image will be something of an anachronism - oh there will be single pictures, but they will be so much more - they will be part of a stream, linked and easily changed from one form into another. Surely you don't want to keep an old fashioned - nearly obsolete term that will be a yoke around the necks of future imagers, do you?

Embrace 'imaging' or be left behind!
 
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